It’s Just a Game
On Christmas Eve a couple years ago, I suggested my family play a board game. First, we tried Scrabble. I turned the word “praying” into “sprayings” and got something like 50 points.
My brother got extremely upset and claimed that wasn’t a valid word. I googled it and it was indeed a word. He got annoyed and pulled up the official Scrabble dictionary.
Lo and behold, “sprayings” wasn’t in it. I told him to just calm down since it was just a game, and he flipped the board over and got the letters all over the place.
He then stormed off. It was crazy—but he wasn’t finished. That same night, we tried to make up by playing Monopoly. My brother considered himself a Monopoly expert, whereas everyone else hadn’t ever played it.
My sister was super unenthusiastic about the game and refused to ever trade properties with him just to be petty. My brother was progressively getting more and more angry.
My mom was completely siding with my sister which got him so upset he eventually flipped the board over again and got little plastic houses and other things everywhere.
He started screaming at my mom and telling her that she had failed parenting my sister because she “intervened too much when they were kids.”
The argument ended with my dad bursting into tears—the first and only time I had ever seen him cry—and all of us just sitting in the living room in silence. My brother was 28 at the time. Story credit: Reddit